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For all the talk about how Mark Penn undermined Clinton’s credibility on free trade by advising the Colombian government, there’s been less attention to how Bill could be doing the exact same thing.
Today, Ben Smith and Sam Stein fleshed out Bill Clinton’s longtime endorsement of the Colombia free trade deal. Short story, he gave several high-paid speeches throughout Latin America advocating for the agreement and accepted an award from Colombian president Uribe for his help.
Clinton spokesman Jay Carson dismissed the Bill/Hillary divide in a statement as old news:
"Senator Clinton is the candidate for president and she is a clear and firm opponent of the Colombian free trade agreement. Like other married couples who disagree on issues from time to time, she disagrees with her husband on this issue. President Clinton has been public about his support for Columbia's request for U.S. trade preferences since 2000,” Carson said. “Yawn.”
Not sure about you, but I’m wide awake. Given the degree to which Hillary participated in her husband’s administration, shouldn’t we expect Bill to be as (if not more) influential in hers? Also, there’s a difference between a wanton adviser and a contradictory spouse. You can’t fire your husband. As someone who would arguably be more powerful than any Cabinet member, shouldn’t Bill’s lobbying matter as much as Mark Penn’s?
Then there’s the China issue. Hillary made news yesterday by urging President Bush to boycott the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. She was smart to get out front on the issue—any chance to relive her 1995 “women’s rights are human rights” moment is worth taking. But if this issue grows as August approaches, her hawkishness will begin to clash with the Clinton administration’s soft China policy. After slamming China for human rights violations in his 1992 campaign, Bill removed human rights standards from China’s Most Favored Nation status requirements for the sake of economic relations. He later became the first president in the world to visit China since Tiananmen Square. (See Peter Baker’s write-up of Bill’s China reversal.)
No doubt Hillary disagreed with her husband’s policy toward China in the 1990s, as she claims to have done on NAFTA, and his actions on behalf of Colombia. But their divergence of opinion now suggests more than a little campaign posturing. No one really believes a President Clinton or a President Obama would be nearly as protectionist as they now claim. “Renegotiating” trade agreements is their blanket term for reform, but that could mean merely adding environmental and labor standards, with little effect on outsourcing. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine either one endangering our cozy relationship with China to make a symbolic statement about human rights, especially with the economy lagging. Once in office, Bill Clinton advocated a "principled, pragmatic approach" to China, which could just as well describe his stance on Colombia and NAFTA. The notion that Hillary or Obama would do anything different will likely vanish at their inauguration.
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Remember Hillary Clinton’s amazing
inter-stellar flight suit from the February debate in Austin? It's back!
Clinton
sported the same gold-trimmed aerodynamic collar on Morning Joe today, prompting host Joe Scarborough to declare his love for Hillary. We figured she would have retired it after our
withering separated-at-birth side-by-side with Star Trek’s Tasha Yar, but clearly she feels she hasn’t locked up
the white male vote as thoroughly as she’d like. We sincerely hope this remains a wardrobe staple. So, for old time’s sake:
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Hurray, everyone’s finally got their narrative! Hillary is untrustworthy—so every time she tells a story, critics will question it. Obama is inexperienced—so every time he does something naive, critics will jump on it. McCain is many things (ill-tempered, an economic dunce) but above all senile—so every time he appears to confuse Iraqi sects, critics start the retirement home drumbeat.
Well, McCain has just dished up some more fodder. While questioning Gen. Petraeus at today’s Senate armed services committee hearing, McCain appears to call al-Qaida in Iraq “a sect of the Shiites”—then catches himself and adds “or Sunnis or anybody else.” Nice recovery!
Sure, people are hypersensitive when it comes to McCain and the Sunni/Shiite divide ever since he confused the two sects during a press conference in Jordan. But then why does he keep doing it? He repeated the mistake on a radio show the same week as his Middle East trip. And now this. Shouldn’t someone from McCain campaign have forced him by now to write al-Qaida is Sunni on the chalkboard 100 times?
Obama has shown his willingness to twist McCain’s “100 years” comment. But McCain is just digging himself deeper with this one. While the "100 years" line is easily distorted, it's also easily refuted. McCain is right when he says it's absurd to suggest he doesn't know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites—and that's why he should really stop mucking it up.
Think Progress has video. Comedy gold, by Senate-hearing standards.
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Just yesterday we told you that Hillary Clinton was a serial spreader of misinformation—and we used the recent revelations that Clinton was using a false anecdote on the stump to prove our point. It turns out that we were as wrong as Hillary: Clinton’s story was partly true—but neither she nor we knew it. The story in question is about a woman who delivered a stillborn child and died shortly after in Ohio. But beyond those basic details, the rest becomes a bit hazy.
Essentially, this is a giant game of telephone. Just for you, we wiretapped the convos. Here’s a quick rundown of how the story began, and how it transformed from there.
First, someone tells the story to Meigs County Deputy Sheriff Bryan Holman. This was the conversation that started it all, but we don’t know when it took place or what was said. We only know that later, Holman told the AP that he had heard the story second-hand. The New York Times reports that he heard it from a close relative of the deceased.
Next, Holman tells Clinton about Trina Bachtel—an Ohio woman who died two weeks after the fetus she was carrying also passed away. Holman said that Bachtel had outstanding bills at a local hospital because she was uninsured, and when she returned while pregnant, the hospital refused to see her unless she could pay a $100 fee. Still uninsured, according to Holman, Bachtel went to another local hospital, where they “stopped her labor” and told her to come back in two days. Before that could happen, she delivered the stillborn child. Later, Bachtel was flown to Columbus, Ohio, where she died within 15 days.
Clinton runs with the story and starts relaying it in her stump speech as proof that the country needs universalized health care. In one instance, according to the AP, Clinton told an audience in Terre Haute, Ind., that Bachtel was uninsured and refused care at a hospital while she was pregnant. She did not mention Bachtel’s outstanding bills and implied that she delivered the stillborn child at the same hospital that initially refused to care for Bechtel. This is different from what Holman told Clinton. (Neither Holman nor Clinton named Bachtel or the hospital.)
The New York Times interviews representatives from the hospital—O’Bleness Memorial—where Bachtel delivered her stillborn child and discovers that they never refused to treat Bachtel. They also claim that she was insured at the time of treatment, a detail that directly contradicts Clinton’s version of the events.
The Clinton campaign admits to not fully vetting the story and says that they trust the hospital to tell the truth. They promise to stop telling the story in Clinton’s stump speech.
Bachtel’s aunt talks to the Washington Post and confirms that Bachtel did have insurance at the time of her death. But when she originally went to the first hospital (before she was pregnant), she was not insured and could not pay the $100 fee for treatment. The hospital sent her a letter that said she couln’t be treated there until she paid off her debt. Meanwhile, before she got pregnant, she acquired insurance but still didn’t go to the hospital closest to her because of her outstanding debt that she still couldn’t afford. (This, remember, contradicts what Holman originally told Clinton—that Bachtel went to the hospital she was indebted to while she was pregnant.) Instead, she went to O’Bleness, where she delivered a stillborn baby, and then died in the Columbus hospital a couple of weeks later. So, Clinton was right that Bachtel was uninsured—at one point she was—but wrong to say that she was uninsured during her pregnancy. Clinton also led voters to believe there was one repeat-offender hospital, when there was really a good-hospital, bad-hospital schema in play.
As of now, that’s where we stand. Clinton probably won’t be incorporating the anecdote into her stump speech anytime soon, but she still comes out of the mini-flap looking like she wasn't fully truthful with voters. The real issue is that nobody on her campaign called to confirm the story—both when it was first told and then when the hospital asserted its version of events. As the Times and Post have proven, it would have taken only two calls. But making two calls for every voter anecdote takes a long time, something that isn't always ensured on the trail.
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An opportunity to grill Gen. Petraeus in the Senate, a
favorable correction on her hospital story, and a bright new pollster bump
Clinton's electoral chances up 0.4 points to 9.9 percent.
The spotlight today is on Gen. David Petraeus and Ryan
Crocker, who return to the Senate after seven months to update senators on
progress in Iraq.
But just as much attention will be focused on the three presidential
candidates, who have no doubt been practicing their scowls in the mirror.
Expect intense skepticism from both Clinton and Obama, but nothing on par with Clinton's inflammatory
"willful
suspension of disbelief" comment. ...
Read more at the Hillary Clinton Deathwatch.